Stuart Carlson for January 22, 2010

We Liberials have to accept the fact that we have just witnessed the high point of Liberialism, and that it probably will never reach this high a point in our lifetimes.

The Bush Supreme Court has just thrown out 100 years of laws, rules, regulations and decisions and declared that Corporations can, as can any American citizen, donate any amount of money to any political campaign, party, or individual that he?/she?it? wants.

This means that the unlimited profits of the Corpotations can be used to support the individuals and/or party that pushes for policies and programs the Corporations want, and it clear that that Party will be the GOP.

Any review of Corpotations in American History show that they have fought any government regulations, and/or departments that could regulate what Corporations do, they have also fought Unions, employee safety and health programs, and any laws that threaten their profits or control.

The GOP can now block not only Health Care, but any liberial legislation, and will do so, because after all it works for them, until the fall elections.

In the fall elections the GOP will wins more seats, because that is what happens in “off-year” elections and block things until 2012, because for them to win in 20112 Obama must fail.

In 2012 the full effect of the Bush Court decision will take effect and the GOP will drown the Democrats in a sea of Coporate greed money, while the GOP float happly by on the yatchs of their owners.

The Democrats were too well positioned financially for this fall. The right needed a thumb on the scale, and Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy were happy to oblige.

Friends, the business of America is business. To resurrect a golden oldie: “What’s good for GM is good for America”. Bring on the by gone days of Lochner and the Robber Barons.

It’$ nice to know our ble$$ed libertie$ are in $uch good hand$!

<=========You can send me the thank you note with the booze and the cocaine over to my ranch later Neocon. We’ll have a party!

That vote was 5 to 4. That’s too close to be reassured by their decision.

av8tor, reading your comments is one of the reasons I feel despair. Your facts are wrong, you ignore truths that don’t fit your view. it was the free rein of Wall St. and their unregulated financial mortgage derivatives, making bets on side bets of side bets, leveraged without regard to collateral 30 to 1, that brought about the “meltdown.” Government saved Wall St, investment banks, not the other way around. And now you blame government and want to turn over the entire country to the scam artists that brought the country to its knees.

av8:

Additional reading:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

My younger daughter worked for a mortgage broker ln ‘03 and ‘04. Their money came from delivering borrowers to the bank. The broker didn’t really care if the loan went south somewhere down the road. The banks gobbled them up. Barney Frank didn’t have a gun to anyone’s head.

Nobody worried if these loans would be repaid. The banks and the brokers simply wanted to churn the business to put a buck on the books that day. Bundle these pigs ears together and pass ‘em on to somebody else, or hope somehow they turn into a silk purse, someday.

Greed, not flawed social engineering, gave us the housing bubble.

Whole thing makes me think about “The Pelican Brief”.

You should be eligible to vote in a campaign to donate to it. This would eliminate corporate, union & foreign money. It would also prevent out of State meddling in local elections. I call it the corruption quarantine; you can only buy your own politicians, not mine.

The assumption here is that minority mortgage applicants are unqualified. Is that your claim?

I am shocked, shocked I tell you!

A prevarication posted on the internet?!

Incredible!

In addition to the news item above debunking of the original premise, in my post above, please see:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/loans.asp

The Buycks-Roberson case deals with denial of mortgage loans based on the applicants neighborhood, not financial worthiness. The following quote is from the opinion allowing the class action to proceed:

The class representatives have alleged that a class of persons have suffered the same injury from Citibank which they have suffered, namely, the denial of home loans based on race discrimination. Plaintiffs also allege that home loans were denied to African-Americans by means of “subjective decisionmaking” practices related to the application of facially neutral underwriting criteria.

The facts alleged were that AA applicants as financially qualified as non-AA applicants were denied loans because they lived in AA neighborhoods. The President was a member of the legal team. He was not lead counsel.

The anti-Obama internet versions of the story are horse hockey. I take it av8’s info came from such a source … or maybe Faux News.

My wife was kidnapped by aliens and taken to the moon, which is made of blue cheese. I don’t need to look it up.

I would need proof that banks were forced to write mortgages for unqualified applicants. And by proof I don’t mean anecdotes. There is a long history in the US of redlining – that is, banks would in effect draw a red line on a map around neighborhoods which were largely African American and refuse to write mortgages in those areas, even for those who were qualified by standard criteria. The suits, as I understand it, were against those practices. Can you show that any court required that unqualified applicants be given mortgages?

I certainly agree that loans were made that should not have been made. But the problem was that banks were willing to write bad mortgages and then sell them off to third parties.

When someone claims that if banks “didn’t give a certain percentage of loans to unqualified minority applicants, they would be heavily fined”, I am more than skeptical. Can you imagine a situation in which someone comes in to a bank and says, “You haven’t given enough loans to unqualified minority applicants!!” That’s not what the case was about.

Show babylon she’s no match for d.c.

*not anti-american, anti-ignorance.

av8tor——–you got my vote….’cause you’re right.

av8tor, the Community Reinvestment Act, passed initially in 1977, applied to banks and savings & loan institutions. It did not force institutions to write bad loans. Some experts believe he CRA played a role in the 2008 economic meltdown, but other experts contend the CRA played no role in the meltdown. What isn’t in disagreement is that the primary cause of the meltdown was the mortgage derivatives the investment banks created to make bets and side bets on mortgages as a way of creating money from, well, making bets. The credit default swaps, collateral debt obligations and other esoteric financial products fell like a house of cards when the housing bubble burst. The small percentage of mortgages in default in 2008 due to bad loans didn’t cause the meltdown. Even Goldman Sachs CEO acknowledged this recently by saying they guess wrong, they assumed the housing bubble would continue indefinitely, a mighty stupid assumption.

Further, there was fraud in the management of hedge funds. It was documented in the first investment bank to go under, Bear Stearns (March 08) and it was caused by that firm’s hedge funds. At least two hedge fund managers have been convicted of fraud, based on their own internal e-mails. The firm underwrote mortgages directly (the line between commercial and investment banks now eliminated) and they knew they bought loans from brokers that wrote bad loans with no income verification.

Mortgage loan brokers played a huge role in the meltdown because they collected higher fees on subprime or alternative mortgages, sold them to others immediately and thus had no financial hit when the bad loans went into default. This has been proved by studies of where the subprimes and defaulted loans originated. From wiki:

Some legal and financial experts note that CRA regulated loans tend to be safe and profitable, and that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. … approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. … independent mortgage companies made risky “high-priced loans” at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.

would encourage those who would like to understand this better to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CommunityReinvestmentAct

I’m with Lonecat and remain sceptical. Yesterday I provided an article debunking this on Chuck Asay and wbr thought its author wasn’t on this planet (great rebuff). Charliekane’s articles were ignored. People will believe what they want to believe and won’t listen to rational arguments with facts.

Church: Have you perhaps misunderstood your wife’s explanation? I cannot see a Corporate Compliance VP getting this type of legislation compliance wrong.

Btw, I see this debate has been brought up before on this forum with Tpenna emphasing redlining some 7 months back. I don’t think it will matter much whether BCS & charliekane bring up more facts regarding this “myth”, people are not listening.

Dear BCS and omQ R – your posts provide good evidence and argument. Redlining has been a major problem in the past, and I hope it has ended. But I just don’t see any evidence that the elimination of redlining has any significant effect on the mortgage meltdowns.

lonecat, I think we agree on that, correct? And that the CRA didn’t force the private brokers who wrote 75-80 percent of the bad loans to do so. They just made more money writing alternative subprime loans with higher interest rates.

chaliekane, your two links were great. Thanks. I notice av8tor won’t acknowledge the snopes debunking his lie about Obama and a 1994 Citibank case.

av8tor, why not try reading the links charlie kane and I posted?

Yes, chaliekane’s first link in particular is very good. I would like to see someone rebut the points made there. If these point can’t be rebutted, then where is the contrary argument?

whoops, noticed link I posted didn’t work; here’s the fix:

http://tinyurl.com/CRAsubprimemortgages

read section 3.5 Relation to 2008 Financial Crisis for explanation I cited

Note this sentence from the article in the link in the post above: “The law, however, emphasizes that an institution’s CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner, and does not require institutions to make high-risk loans that may bring losses to the institution.” Now Wiki isn’t always right, as I tell my students, so if anyone can correct this, please go ahead. If you can’t correct it, then what’s the argument?

think you’ll appreciate this lonecat

http://tinyurl.com/GoldmanSachsinvestigationvideo

and five-part series at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/goldman/

here we go again we have no rights we are the people of united states and not one other country not one other leader ever help us out with our storms like katreena or any help on our snow storms but we aid evry country out there with our money not theres. agree what is you opion?

BCS – thanks again for these interesting links. You’re a great finder of things – are you in research in some way? Or just talented?

But it’s hard to keep up with all this and still earn a living. But I will work through them gradually. Thanks again.

senor – I think kissnow is someone else in disguise. I don’t say this because I know, it’s only a guess.

I think kissnow is Don Imus.

lonecat, thanks. I just discovered the McClatchy 5-part series and haven’t had time to read it all yet. I look forward to doing so. FWIW, I started searching for credible info about the economic meltdown immediately; I felt a need to understand it because nothing close to this has ever occurred in my lifetime. The very idea of bailing out the entire commercial/investment banking industry was unimaginable, yet it happened. Because I’m retired, I have the time to do it that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

lonecat & ET I agree with lonecat’s guess that kissnow is another poster in disguise.

Dear BCS – I grew up on stories of the Great Depression, and I’ve done enough reading to know a little about previous serious economic crises. The US managed a long period after WW II without a comparable downtown, and I have been persuaded that part of the credit goes to the New Deal reforms. I remember reading an article by Heilbroner (I think) in the New York Review probably twenty years ago with good analysis of the damping of the business cycle – that is, the swings in the cycle were reduced. So I’ve been troubled over the years to see these reforms attacked. I was worried that if the reforms were seriously loosened, then the big swings in the business cycle would reappear.

It’s probably too early to know exactly what happened this time, but (a) I bet fifty years from now everyone will agree that the relaxation of reforms contributed significantly to this crisis, and (b) that the intervention did help.

But it’s hard to campaign on something that didn’t happen. And the crisis remains a crisis, certainly for those unemployed. More needs to be done. I don’t completely trust the economic Obama has brought in – I worry that they are too close to the system that caused the problem in the first place.

Let’s keep talking – you’ve taught me a lot already, and I’d like to know more.

lonecat, I don’t trust Obama’s economic team either. The more that gets revealed about Geitner’s role , the more disturbed. I think it may be time for Geitner to go, and time to bring someone new in who does nor have such an incestuous history with Wall St. I’ve thought for a long time that Obama has relied too much on Clinton’s team (Rubin and Summers crafted the deregulation that occurred under Clinton). I’m very encouraged he’s brought in Paul Volker in a significant way. But I still hope the old Clintonites influence wanes quickly and significantly.